We've had the traditional media cycle around the release of Google Wave. The initial oh my god this is going to change the world articles, then a bunch of techs have dug into the released doco and realised that google wave is under specified, and now we have Ray Ozzie of MS and Groove fame coming out and saying that Google Wave is anti-web, and is thus going to fail.

Responding to all of that in reverse order goes something like this. Ray Ozzie's criticism of Wave isn't the traditional inter vendor slanging match, it's something different. Wave is damn close to Ray's heart, he was at the center of Lotus Notes, and then Groove. Wave is effectively Lotus Notes, web scale. Ray is reacting emotionally to the failure of Notes and Groove to be accepted by the web at large.

As to Wave being under specified, yes it is. Google is following it's internal development model of fail fast. Get it out, and find the mistakes by having lots of people push it around. Following the mailing lists, the developers know there are issues here, that the docs are inconsistent and need more diagrams. They are responding to criticism and working to incorporate everything that is being picked up. Traditional trial by fire.

As to the fan boyish Wave will change the world stuff? I'll be honest, any collaboration system that can be used by fifty engineers to come to agreement on anything is a massive step up from where we are right now. And from what I can see, it is already succeeding on that level. This step of pulling in external developers to play with the platform is the next move in figuring out the user interface, and finding out what direction people want to take this technology. I expect it is going to be a roller coaster ride for the Google Wave team.

The reason I'm excited about Wave has nothing to do with the product itself. Some quick history is in order. When Google released it's Maps interface back in 2006, they changed the world. Suddenly clients expected web pages to be interactive. Being able to drag a map surface around, zoom in and out, all without page reloads was now the new bar. This flowed throughout the rest of the industry, and made AJAX a standard required skill, even for back water enterprise developers like myself.

What the release of Wave does is step the bar up again. Now clients are going to expect to be able to do collaborative form fill in their corporate applications, because Google have shown that it can be done. This is going to impact everyone from FaceBook to Adobe. Suddenly it's not just the web page that we expect to be interactive, it's the whole application. We now expect to interact with other people in real time through the web.

So to Ray Ozzie's claim that Wave is not of the Web, I totally agree, it's not. Wave is not respecting the constraints of HTTP's page reload model. It is showing a new world where engineers can build complex client side web applications and have real time full duplex communications across the web. This is where we are going, and it's going to change everything.